Restore a deleted site collection in SharePoint Server 2010

This article describes new functionality of how to restore a deleted site collection in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 with Service Pack 1.

In prior versions of SharePoint Server 2010, if a site collection (that is, an SPSite object) was accidentally deleted, there was not a direct way of restoring a specific deleted site collection. The only method to restore a deleted site collection was to restore the entire farm from a backup. This was costly and time consuming, and typically was not performed.

When a site collection is accidentally deleted in SharePoint Server 2010 with SP1, the deleted site collection is stored in the SPDeletedSite object, not the SPSite object. Therefore, to restore a deleted site collection, you must use the Restore-SPDeletedSite Windows PowerShell cmdlet or programmatically access the object model.